The 2018 8th of March was a historical day for feminist Spanish movements: hundreds of thousands of women went on strike and to the streets to demand equal rights and to fight against gender oppression and the numerous episodes of violence against women. For 11 months, local, regional and national networks - from assemblies and events to email lists, Twitter accounts and Telegram groups - were able to coordinate efforts combining similar goals and contentious practices. Results were immediate and impressive in terms of public and political visibility: major newspapers around the world reported on it, and the hashtags related to the strike were among the trending topics in Spain days before the strike and on the 8th of March. On the other hand, the messages and political and symbolical disputes those diverse women were engaging in - inside and outside of feminist movements - offer an opportunity to understand the moving boundaries of new political paradigms, which question the sexual division of labor and the economic, political and social inequalities based on gender.

I recently proposed a first look at the contentious process that culminated in the 2018 women’s strike in Spain, the first one recently organized at national level in the country. Those are preliminary results of fieldwork conducted from Barcelona, one of the cities where the mobilizations were multitudinous. It was thought out through transnational connections and intended to enact the transformative nature of feminist movements and their views. The very strategy to go on strike instead of choosing other repertoires carries a specific message of action in the economic sphere, which is performaticaly different from marches and petitions, even though the strike was combined with street demonstrations. That is, those activists organized a broad mobilization effort that included street demonstrations, but aimed at concretely affecting the different realms in which women face multiple oppressions, in the social and political, private and public spheres. Going on strike meant bringing into light the presence/absence of women in those dimensions where they are systematically exploited, oppressed, unrecognized or excluded from. It was not only conceived as a labor strike (joined by around 6 million people), but it was envisioned to be a consumption, care and student’s strike: a feminist strike.

More specifically, the discussions regarding gender roles, violence and oppression took place in multiple levels, either online and/or offline. A brief analysis of the 15 most retweeted messages over the month before revealed that a significant part of the effort was still to convince women of the legitimacy of such mobilization and its demands, or why women stopped. Part of the messages also called for union, while others exposed organizations or political figures for not supporting it. To be a woman in Spain is an open discursive battlefield, either among women themselves or among those who benefit from patriarchal structures. The organization of the strike in Barcelona illustrates these disputes: at least part of the women involved did not feel their demands were being prioritized, as was the case of migrants collectives, and the overlapping of the local political context generated polarized debates over the specifics of the Catalan manifesto.

Some of the relevant questions feminist movements in Spain have asked themselves address the resulting impact of the demonstrations, what to do with the legacy of the 2018 women’s strike, and what will the 2019 8th of March look like. This is definitely not a finalized discussion or a consensual one, as the discussions over the last Encuentro in Mérida showed. Nevertheless, such conflicts allow for specific contexts, experiences and points of view to interact and dispute hegemonic and counter hegemonic equilibria inside and outside feminist movements. The challenge, then, is to be able to do it while preserving and stimulating alliances among diverse women.

Encuentro Estatal 8M (Mérida): preparing the 2019 8M

In the beginning of this month, feminists movements all over Spanish State have come together in Mérida, Extremadura. I had the chance to be at the III Encuentro Estatal de la Comisión 8M, with more than 200 women from multiple regions of Spain, from Tenerife to Galicia and the Baleares Islands. One of the points of discussion was presenting their evaluation of the last 8th of March. More importantly, they have started the debates to reflect upon demands and the organization of the 2019 8th of March.

First of all, the evaluation of the 2018 women’s strike in Spain was widely positive. The massive presence of protesters overwhelmed the organizers, who also highlighted the great number of young women and students demonstrating on that day in more than a hundred cities in Spain. On the other hand, criticism towards the behavior of trade unions and political parties was also an issue most of the local commissions shared, regarding attempts to guide or take over the organization or protagonism of feminist movements. Moreover, the two major trade unions only called for a 2-hour partial strike, which was harshly criticized by activists.

Nevertheless, complex questions and challenges surfaced in the activists’ speeches across that weekend: what exactly were the political outcomes of the women’s strike and demonstrations? How to fully take advantage of the hallmark and strength generated by this year’s mobilizations? What are the demands, goals and intended impact for next year’s 8th of March? What will be the repertoires and strategies chosen to achieve them?

After a successful effort such as this year’s mobilizations, prepared over months in a coordinated articulation among local women’s groups, it is expected those groups would face disputes internally and externally. The visibility feminists movements gained contribute to put their distinct political visions in friction (Tsing, 2005), inside organizations as well as in spheres of debate such as social media platforms. Those frictions may actually promote the creation of new initiatives and spaces for radical ideas to be collectively conceived.

Part of the activists at Mérida understood that the strike branches of care and consumption were not embraced or impactful as expected, at the same time that a labor strike is not a repertoire recognizable or available to all women living in Spain. The contradictory nature of the intersections of the oppressive structures of patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism pose a strategic and symbolic challenge when it comes to building congruent and encompassing feminist political paradigms. Feminist views of the world that do not recognize the intersectional oppressions that affect women in different ways have a limited and ultimately not a radically transformative approach.

One of greatest challenges is exactly turning such frictions into transformative alliances among their diverse backgrounds, instead of fragmenting or weakening the current coalition at state level. Such challenge is both organizational and political: it is about what demands gain more protagonism, which internal and external organizational arrangements are chosen and which contentious repertoires are able to performatically enact those activists’ views.

Looking forward: a technopolitical sidenote

In multilayered political environments where online and offline practices are inextricably interwoven, networked forms of participation and organization can improve the processes of articulation of movements such as the Spanish Comisión 8M. As the example of the 15M movement demonstrated, the technopolitics of networked movements organizing and protesting go beyond having wide access to digital platforms, but is also about ensuring privacy, horizontality, open knowledge and citizen control over political processes taking place in them. Private platforms such as Facebook, Telegram or Google products have multiple limits of design, data policy, interface, purpose and final use (as the cases such as Snowden and Cambridge Analytica showed), which also compromise movements’ autonomy.

Considering the lack of transparency, the multiple political interests and aggressive business models corporate digital platforms survive on, alternative ones that are built to stimulate technological autonomy and democratic interactions can be a counter-hegemonic form to build social movements. An emblematic example of an alternative to be experimented is Decidim. Decidim is a political participation platform, “an open and free infrastructure for participatory democracy. It is also a project that aims at being an asset and model for political transformation” (Barandiaran et. al, p. 138).

It has been developed by Barcelona City Hall in partnership with universities, social movements and citizens. It is a free and open-source platform that can offer the means and spaces for networked movements or organizations like the Comisión 8M. Those are spaces that propel connections hundreds or thousands of activists or organizations to engage in deliberative processes. The platform allows for the creation of multiples threads of debates, preparing and geolocating physical events, voting and coordinating political processes. Although using Decidim, obviously, does not ensure reaching political consensus, it is a platform that has embedded, in its core, a commitment to participatory democracy and technological autonomy. As such feminist movements are trying to propose new political models that are inclusive and which political principles are not founded in domination, inequality and oppressive relations, such ideals - it is relevant to stress - are aligned with the technopolitical values that motivated the concept and design of Decidim. It is not only a useful technology but also politically aligned, both in its speech and in its construction. For the next months, these disputes will set the scene for the next actions of a powerful networked movement, which can lead Spain towards feminist radical democratic practices. The challenge is huge, as it is the one to do it, as women, together.